5 Ways to Improve your Marketing Workflow

byJohn Koenig

Successfully executing a consistent and predictable marketing campaign largely depends on the people, processes, and platforms you rely on during the Brand Marketing Process.

A solid marketing workflow is key to keeping production moving. More importantly, without a workflow that keeps your teams working in lock step, your narrative tends to become lost and your brand suffers as a result. Here are 5 ways to improve your marketing workflow.

1. Establish a designated communication system

Constant communication can be overhead enough, let alone when its scattered across communication channels such as email, Slack, meetings and texts. Centralize your communication methods and establish a single place for feedback and decision making.

Opal customers rely on our objective-oriented approach to collaboration around marketing objects such as content, assets and briefs to establish a single place for communication. Eliminating email approval chains and centralizing content approval in Opal helps teams streamline communications and focus on producing quality content that achieves results.

2. Align around clear goals and objectives

Develop clear campaign goals and objectives that keep your team aligned and formalize these goals in a brief that is accessible throughout the entire workflow. Siloed teams have a natural tendency to take a global brief and disseminate and execute it in ways that deviate from the intended purpose and message. Multiply that by the number of channels and functional teams and you end up with a very disjointed customer message.

Keeping a single place for briefs keeps all teams moving toward the same goals. In Opal, story-level briefs are accessible throughout, even at the point of content creation regardless of what channel you’re building for.

3. Create cross-functional check-ins

Brand marketing campaigns touch multiple channels and functional teams. These teams need more than just a common set of tools, they need a methodology for working together. Create milestones to have team leads check-in and share progress against the goals.

Opal’s StoryFirst methodology helps teams establish a process for working together. With clear milestones in a single platform, it’s easy to pull together the different teams to connect both on and off-line.

4. Encourage collaboration

Teamwork isn’t just important for productivity, it’s critical. Our customers say they achieve substantial efficiency when their teams simply work together.

As David Gorman notes in his post Collaboration Beyond the @mention, “a Fortune 100 company that relies on Opal to stay connected with their teams and the work they are doing…estimated their company has saved tens of millions of dollars thanks to teams actually working together in Opal.”

5. Maintain a best practices document

You’ve done all of the hard work to establish a workflow now document it. Keep it updated and accessible to the team. Implementation is nothing without the support and maintenance required to ensure it persists.

Establishing workflow best practices isn’t why we love marketing, but it makes marketing much better and everyone loves that.